AY 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Shepherd Moons, Giant Planet, Rings Of Saturn
Document Summary
Two parts: ball: a normal jovian planet with indistinct bands almost twice as far from sun as jupiter, clouds: seen through cold haze. Saturn"s rings: nature at its artistic finest: the prominent dark gap in the rings is called the cassini division. It is a mostly empty zone detectable even in a small telescope. Its polar diameter is 10% less than its equatorial diameter: the cause of this non-spherical shape is the relatively low density of the planet in conjunction with its rapid rotation (period= 10. 2 hours) Like jupiter, saturn has a dipole magnetic field. However, this is weaker than earth"s magnetic field. The rings of saturn are difficult to resolve into their millions of orbiting fragments, even in spacecraft views. This is because the fragments are very small. How big are the fragments, and what are they made of: range from less than 1 cm (1/2 inch) to ~10 meters (30 feet, made of 99% water ice.
